"Meanspo Please, I Want to Lose Weight": A Characterization Study of Meanspiration Content on Tumblr Based on Images and Texts

Linda Achilles, Thomas Mandl, Christa Womser-Hacker

Abstract: Past research has demonstrated a linkage between social media usage and disordered eating habits and body dissatisfaction. Trends relating to eating disorders develop around specific hashtags in communities in social networking sites such as Tumblr. One of these trends is #meanspiration, a tag that is used to request and give mean messages from/to social media users to inspire them to lose weight. In this study, images and texts of Meanspiration posts are automatically analyzed based on colorfulness, the images’ emotional measures pleasure, arousal and dominance, whereas the textual information of the posts is evaluated based on sentiments, emotions and readability. These characteristics are used in a classification task to distinguish Meanspiration from regular content on Tumblr with 81% accuracy.